November marked the launch of a compelling new digital resource hosted by the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies and the Penn Libraries. BASIRA, the Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art project (https://basira.library.upenn.edu), is a new, open-access online database of representations of books and other textual documents in the figurative arts between approximately 1300 and 1600 CE. With the launch of the new database portal, users … Continue reading Investigating the Image of the Book: BASIRA launches at the 2023 Schoenberg Symposium

We’re delighted to announce that the BASIRA public search interface will officially launch at this year’s Schoenberg Symposium for Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age, which will be held November 16–18 2023 at the University of Pennsylvania and the Free Library of Philadelphia. Now in its sixteenth year, the Schoenberg Symposium is an open, free-to-the-public event that gathers scholars, students, and interested members of the … Continue reading Save the Date: BASIRA launches at the 2023 Schoenberg Symposium, November 16–18 2023

The BASIRA Project team has been working on the re-designed Content Management system for the past two years. Along with our collaborator, Performant Software, we’re very happy to be able to post these samples from our new interface — a web-based resource that supports access with any web browser. Configuration lists for artists, repositories, and places are shared by records across the entire system. Likewise, … Continue reading Coming attractions! a preview of our new CM system

The BASIRA team has passed another milestone, one we’ve been working to reach for almost two years. The new web-based platform for our data and image management is now operational; only minor revisions are yet to be completed. While this is a transition worthy of celebrating, merriment has to wait, because there are over 500 legacy records to update with our vastly expanded data model … Continue reading Te Deum or Tedium?